1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to part numbering for controlling and identifying parts used in the manufacture of products and, more particularly, to a system and method for automated mapping of part numbers associated with parts in a bill of materials.
2. Background Description
Part numbers are widely used within an enterprise throughout the manufacturing process. The point of entry of such part numbers into the manufacturing process is normally via a Bill of Materials or BOM sent by a contact manufacturer or supplier. For example, many companies require the use of a constant and uniform method to control and identify the millions of parts used throughout their manufacturing processes. The frequent and pervasive use of these numbers demands that they be accurately and quickly propagated through the system to ensure smooth operation. Also keeping track of price and other non-price attributes of the parts allows for comparison with the company-specific suppliers' cost for the same part or previously mapped parts.
One of the main bottlenecks to accuracy and speed of entering part numbers exists at the actual entry to the manufacturing process, the receipt of a Bill of Materials (BOM). A BOM typically consists of several line items, each line item containing information on one specific part. This information includes, amongst other things, the BOM sender's part number, the BOM receiver's corresponding internal part number for the part in question, a textual description of the part, the name of the supplier, etc. However, in a substantial number of cases, the BOM receiver's internal part number is absent. Moreover, it also often occurs that both the BOM receiver's internal part number as well as the BOM sender's part number are missing. In both cases, it becomes imperative to map that line item to the appropriate internal part number assigned to that part by the BOM receiver.
Historically, this mapping process has been done manually which is a highly time-consuming, labor intensive and error-prone process. Attempts at automating this process have been limited to simple string similarity methods keyword searches or simple rule-based systems. These methods too have produced little improvement, since more often that not, these methods fail to produce appropriate mappings and the task has to be done manually once again. No one has tried to use full-fledged machine learning methods to automatically learn models for mapping such part numbers by using information about the part that is available in the corresponding BOM line item such as part description, supplier information and so on.